Travel Marketing Trends for 2017 & Beyond Webinar

Editor's Notes

1. Todays Webinar will kick off with a brief intro to me, my background and why I’m speaking on this subject, followed by a bit of a whirlwind tour of digital marketing trends that you should be thinking about this year. I’ve done my best to include some actions to carry out, to hopefully steer you in the right direction. After that I’ll be broadcasting a live poll, which will allow you to anonymously tell me which of these trends are most important to you, or the industry in general. And then of course I’ll allow some time for us to go over any questions you may have. And just a quick word on that – I consider this a two way street, so I’d love to hear your own ideas about trends we should be keeping an eye on and we can discuss those during the Q&A.
2. Most of my role focuses on PPC advertising, non-technical SEO, and Content Marketing. Before joining Sagittarius I spent four years living and working in Japan as an English Teacher (and I also officiated weddings as a pretend priest on weekends, which was fun too). Anyways while out there I snapped a landscape photo that later got very very popular on-and-offline, due to a little bit of tinkering and planning. If you’d like to read how I did it, theres a blog on the Sagittarius website I wrote. Since then I’ve taken some formal courses on PPC/SEO and Content Marketing, and my strong interest in technology and travel makes my role at Sagittarius a very nice fit for me. So with that out of the way we can move on and start talking about how things changed in 2016 and what it means for this year, and beyond.
3. Speaking of the live poll, if you visit this link in your browsers, you’ll be able to vote when the time comes. If you need me to repeat it during the webinar just let me know.
4. When I was a student, I had a graphic t-shirt with a bit of a cringey text (that I thought was very clever at the time). As you can see it expressed a desire for things like jetpacks and robot butlers and virtual reality helmets and hoverboards – in short I wanted the future I was promised as a kid, watching films like Back to the Future.
5. Well 2016 was the first year that made me feel like I was living in that future. All of a sudden consumer VR came into our lives with the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, as well as mobile VR getting more and more prevalent. If you’ve been on social media at all in the past year you’ve probably seen one of those videos of Tesla autopilots preventing accidents, and you might have even tuned in to watch Elon Musk’s plan to colonise and terraform Mars.
6. Something that seemed impossible when I was a kid, but suddenly in 2016 I’m watching a business seminar on how to make it happen. I’m not suggesting that you start setting up hotels or flights to Mars, but it gives you an idea of just how quickly changes can sneak up on us. So obviously being hugely interested in not just technology, but also trends that affect the future, I inevitably start applying that enthusiasm to my digital marketing career – and when a trend or piece of tech emerges that I can utilize, I’ll try experimenting with it.
7. Which brings us to an increasingly popular bit of digital marketing – the rise, and rise of voice search
8. With so many products coming out with Voice technology, by now most of you may already understand what Voice Search is, but just in case I’ll give a quick intro…
9. Voice Search is simply searching, but by voice instead of typing. Chances are your phone has a voice assistant, either siri, google now or cortana.
10. In most cases, Voice Search is situational – google has stated that Voice Search is most used when driving (which makes sense). They also stated that the second most popular place Voice Search occurs is in the bathroom. I do not have answer to why they know this. Anyway the point is, Voice Search appeals to moments when its preferable to traditional searching – are they walking and finding it difficult to type? Do they not have both hands free? These are moments that travelers may come across. Just before we move on, I’d recommend visiting ok-google.io if you’d like to see a full list of what your Android can do.
11. So, the most interesting aspect of Voice Search is that Queries are much more conversational than traditional searches. “Show me hotels near me.”“Where can I find a hotel near LaGuardia Airport?” “I want a New York hotel with a pickup service.”
12. suddenly things like “where” and “how” are being used a lot more, and presenting a lot more opportunities for longtail searches, because search volume is increasing.
13. And if we trust in Google’s statements, these Voice Searches are largely focused on decision making, so theyre well worth investing time into researching and implementing
14. Now I decided to conduct a little experiment with voice search in my town, but before we move onto that…
15. We’ve got staaaats! every webinar should have some FASCINATING stats, so lets consider them to give us a little bit of context. As with all tech we enjoy being a bit silly with it, like we’ve probably all done with questions to Siri in the past. Just a few years ago, 85 percent of users didn’t use Siri seriously, so that gives us a good baseline to compare to…
16. So yeah, compare to last year, Google revealed that 20 percent of all queries on Androids are performed with voice (and we’ve moved on from purely silly questions).
17. Its also been estimated by external sources that 10% of ALL searches are made by search, largely due to the wide number of devices that utilize it – particularly the Amazon Echo and Google Home, which are built around it. So, now that we’ve all enjoyed and been FASCINATED by those stats, we can move onto my experiment.
18. First of all for a bit of a basis, I took a look at Amazon’s Echo product page to see example phrases you can ask it. And what I’m looking for are phrases that might related to a purchase – something we can manipulate
19. … and I focused on these two as holding some kind of potential.
20. So now that I had an idea of a basis to start my experiment, I thought I’d ask OK Google for three things, while I was in Picadilly, and see what hotels would ‘win’. First of all I went REALLY specific by asking ____ - in this scenario I expected Holiday Inn would be the big ‘winner’, because I’ve specified I want that hotel. Secondly, I asked ____, as this is a very basic request. And lastly, because I feel like a little bit of exfoliating before I rest my head, I’ve decided that the hotel I stay at simply must have a sauna.
21. So with the first request for a holiday inn, predictably I received one nice shiny blip on my phone. I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted. Secondly, also as predicted, asking for “a hotel” resulted in a great deal of hotel “blips” appearing on my phone. This means that at the most basic level, Google has been fed enough information to recognize that these locations are HOTELS, although it might have offered the user a BIT too much choice, so they might decide to ask for something a bit more specific, maybe somewhere a bit higher-end, perhaps with a sauna… And with that request, I received two blips, as denoted by the red dots here. Now heres the interesting thing. I know for a fact that the Ritz here has a sauna, as a colleague has stayed there before, but Ritz has not provided Google with enough structured data to let Google know that they have a sauna, and so, in this specific request, it hasn’t so much ‘lost the game’ as ‘being left out entirely’.
22. So with the first request for a holiday inn, predictably I received one nice shiny blip on my phone. I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted. Secondly, also as predicted, asking for “a hotel” resulted in a great deal of hotel “blips” appearing on my phone. This means that at the most basic level, Google has been fed enough information to recognize that these locations are HOTELS, although it might have offered the user a BIT too much choice, so they might decide to ask for something a bit more specific, maybe somewhere a bit higher-end, perhaps with a sauna… And with that request, I received two blips, as denoted by the red dots here. Now heres the interesting thing. I know for a fact that the Ritz here has a sauna, as a colleague has stayed there before, but Ritz has not provided Google with enough structured data to let Google know that they have a sauna, and so, in this specific request, it hasn’t so much ‘lost the game’ as ‘being left out entirely’.
23. So with the first request for a holiday inn, predictably I received one nice shiny blip on my phone. I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted. Secondly, also as predicted, asking for “a hotel” resulted in a great deal of hotel “blips” appearing on my phone. This means that at the most basic level, Google has been fed enough information to recognize that these locations are HOTELS, although it might have offered the user a BIT too much choice, so they might decide to ask for something a bit more specific, maybe somewhere a bit higher-end, perhaps with a sauna… And with that request, I received two blips, as denoted by the red dots here. Now heres the interesting thing. I know for a fact that the Ritz here has a sauna, as a colleague has stayed there before, but Ritz has not provided Google with enough structured data to let Google know that they have a sauna, and so, in this specific request, it hasn’t so much ‘lost the game’ as ‘being left out entirely’.
24. So with the first request for a holiday inn, predictably I received one nice shiny blip on my phone. I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted. Secondly, also as predicted, asking for “a hotel” resulted in a great deal of hotel “blips” appearing on my phone. This means that at the most basic level, Google has been fed enough information to recognize that these locations are HOTELS, although it might have offered the user a BIT too much choice, so they might decide to ask for something a bit more specific, maybe somewhere a bit higher-end, perhaps with a sauna… And with that request, I received two blips, as denoted by the red dots here. Now heres the interesting thing. I know for a fact that the Ritz here has a sauna, as a colleague has stayed there before, but Ritz has not provided Google with enough structured data to let Google know that they have a sauna, and so, in this specific request, it hasn’t so much ‘lost the game’ as ‘being left out entirely’.
25. The lesson here is that as users get more specific, your structured data needs to appeal to voice search and “in-the-moment” searches. I’d even suggest considering catering to in-destination searches, to keep your interactions with your travelers consistent. And lastly one other big benefit to this:
26. So, what can you do to appeal to the rise of voice search? With a rise in conversational voice searches, you should try to target these keywords, by way of advanced keyword research, and a bit of ingenuity. You could also try and be clever and think about the context of the question – are they asking for something because of where they are? Can you target that location in Adwords to cut down on competition and cpc? Next, if you’re looking to answer that question, you need to actually have an answer – that means tailoring your content around those questions, especially since Voice Search aims to reply with a SINGLE definitive answer. To appeal to Local SEO, think about Schema markup practices and what you can do to improve it – get specific and give Google as much info as possible!
27. Next up, in 2017 we can expect more from Google to create and encourage others to drive customer journey, that has nothing to do with any of our websites (on page, at least).
28. Just to prove that I’m not making this next bit up, Sundar Pichai made it known in 2014 (I think)
29. Mobile usage is going to be most affected by this, both because mobile websites tend to deliver a poor user experience, and most users are going to be using mobile when they take advantage of all of this. That will make sense when we start thinking about what this Search Result page allows a user to do…
30. And they’re getting pretty good at it.
31. 2016 saw the release of Google Trips, an app that acts as a trip planner, while aggregating all of the info Google currently provides in Search Results Pages. Theres a bit of genius to this in that Google did not need to spend time collecting info – they just improved the User Experience of those Results and presented them in the form of a travel planning app.
32. And again, this is all part of Google experimenting, testing the waters, to see if users respond more to their own customer journey, rather than our own. And they do this just because so many websites get it wrong, so I suppose they’ve decided to take it into their own hands – I think they’d say they were trying to “inspire” us, but there you go.
33. And they might just be justified in saying that they’re aiming to inspire us, because in truth anyone could replicate this with their own website, in the form of a Progressive Web App.
34. If you haven’t heard about Progressive Web Apps yet, think about how native mobile apps do things like send push notifications, and offer a streamlined mobile experience to customers. The appeal of PWAs is that they don’t require a user to manually install them. Instead, they are downloaded in the background from your website. And the big appeal for travel brands is that your customers can access this mobile experience offline (which is immensely useful for travellers losing signal, or relying on an airports poor Wi-Fi). Air Berlin took advantage of this by utilising a PWA to let users navigate to and access their boarding pass on mobile or laptop, even if online service was not available, making boarding a much smoother experience for travellers. The technology driving PWAs has existed for quite a few years, however it is Google’s recent push towards supporting them in Chrome that has inspired travel brands to start taking advantage. 
35. While none of this has involved visiting your website, the Search Results Page is INFORMED by it – meaning that if your metadata isn’t up to scratch, or you‘re not implementing structured data, at best you’re not going to be included in any shortlisting (like when a user selects “cheap” in the modifiers, or wants free-wifi), and at worst you’re not going to be listed at all. And if you’ve got the developers or resources available, you can try to beat Google’s attempts at their customer journey – after all you have the advantage as you know your own business better than Google, and they can’t do things like offer offline access to boarding passes or your hotel’s brochure, but you can!
36. I think Content Marketing is becoming a more inviting choice for Brands, what with PPC becoming ever more competitive, and you may have even heard about Facebook actually putting limits on posts that aren’t funded with cash, meaning even Social Media has become pay-to-play. That means that to get your business seen, you may need to focus on genuine content that people want to share. However, one way to “skip” content creation is to help other people create THEIRS, and there is a really great reason to consider doing this, which we’ll come to in a moment. Out of everything we talk about today, I think this is going to be one of the more immediately achievable actions.
37. So when I talk about other people’s content, I’m focusing solely on YouTubers (or Content Creators), of which there are thousands, each with their own niches and subscriber counts. Now helping a content creator can be as simple as paying for a tour, or a multi-night stay, in return for a quick mention in their videos, as well as some prime video content of your location or tour.
38. The other big appeal of course is that these youtubers have cultivated a huge amount of trust with their viewers, so anything they promote is going to be considered when they decide to take their own trips. You might have heard recently that online advertising has eclipsed TV advertising in terms of spend, and when you look at stats like these from last year, you can really understand why. Now we’re currently in the middle of attempting something like this, and we’re going a step further…
39. After reaching out to these YouTubers, we’ve got a network of Remarketing placements set up to target their audiences AFTER they’ve viewed the video, either by Display or Gmail ads with related offers. In fact one of the best things about this is that there are likely popular videos out there with your hotel or tour or other service already featured, and with a little searching you can remarket to viewers of these videos, without even having to sponsor the content in the first place. Spending an hour searching for videos with any sort of info or content on your brand is well worth doing, if only for testing how effective remarketing could be for this kind of approach.
40. Aaand this last one is how I gained about 200,000 views in a week on my little photography print website, so with a little careful planning you really can get results with virtually no cost.
41. 2016 has seen an incredible year for the development of VR Since May, consumer models have hit the stores, Mobile VR has grown considerably with FB & YouTube introducing 360 degrees - VR isn’t just for games – it’s a great platform for content & STORYTELLING - VR content on facebook has MUCH higher retention and sharing counts than traditional video – we’ve just embarked on our first 360 video adventure with Race of Champions and we saw a much higher amount of engagement than our usual image posts.
42. Many are still unsure about whether theres any point in investing VR, or if it won’t be around for long like the 3DTV (a comment I see on LinkedIn all the time), but unlike the 3DTV, VR is immersive, and it gives the user control (great engagement), but heres the most important bit: The 3DTV had a very high cost-of-access, whereas VR headsets are given away with mobile phone contracts. The userbase is growing (over 200% growth in 2016 compared to 2015), and prices are expected to drop by 15% each year. This is why I think marketers need to stop referring to it as “the next big thing”, because (like it or not), its here to stay Big brands are already utilizing VR for marketing.
43. It would take too long to go into during this webinar, but my colleague Ellen Pickett wrote a fantastic blog full of examples, one of which comes from our own client Contiki (which everyone at Sagittarius is excited about), so I would definitely recommend taking the time to read through this blog post after the webinar, if you have the time. The gist of it really is that VR is an extremely powerful tool for content marketing – specifically STORYTELLING and creating brand loyalty, simply because its so immersive, and engaging.
44. So before we talk about actions you can take, I wanted to quickly touch on its potential to provide a better User Experience for purchasing. So, to give a quick idea of what more VR can do for travel, I wanted to quickly show this demonstration for Google Earth VR. At the moment it is currently only available for the more expensive consumer models (like the HTC Vive), but Google are working on bringing a version of this to mobile VR. my wife and I both tried Google Earth at home, and we spent most of the time “revisiting” childhood homes and places we’d travelled to (gimmicky stuff), but within a month, whilst planning a weekend trip to Paris, she asked me if she could use it to see how far away an AirBnB flat was from the Eiffel Tower. VR provided a much better user experience than a simple map when it came to visualizing the distance, and walking time. She even looked around for cafes that offered a view by virtually “standing outside” them and looking around.
45. Essentially what she did was turn this,
46. … Into this. The potential IS there for VR to start experimenting with purchasing journeys. Google have already shown interest in developing travel apps, as well as growing VR and its userbase in general, so while it might sound a bit out there, we may see something like this in the future.
47. Can you elaborate on the differences between 3DTV and VR? I think they’re both gimmicks. How should we contact YouTubers if we want to sponsor them? Could you describe Progressive Web Apps again?